Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

the crown jewel was the final musical guest. As Uberettos lined the venue inside the Palms hotel, the house lights went dark and the stage filled with smoke. A voice began to sing the first few slow bars of a familiar song. Then she appeared. Wrapped in a blood-red jumpsuit, sequins shimmering against the neon beams behind her, fog machines wrapping her in mist. The words started coming into focus, a hit all the twentysomething employees knew by heart: “Got me looking so crazy right now, your love’s got me looking so crazy right now. . . .” Employees began screaming as the singer stepped into the spotlight. They realized what Kalanick had done: He got Beyoncé.

At the end of the week, Uber’s finance team added it all up. The entire “X to the x” celebration cost Uber more than $25 million in cash—more than twice the amount of Uber’s Series A round of venture capital funding.

“Super pumpedness is all about moving the team forward, working long hours—pretty much a do-whatever-it-takes attitude to move the company in the right direction,”

He now held a siege mentality, one that perceived dangerous enemies all around, and developed a quasi-Darwinian vision of what it takes to survive. “There are forces all around you when you run a company, . . . ready to take you out,” Kalanick said. “The [CEOs] that survive are the ones that are supposed to be there.”

For Kalanick, blogging¶ was a way of marketing himself, along with the occasional talk delivered at startup mixers and cocktail parties. “My people think of me as a funding shepherd,” Kalanick once said to a roomful of young engineers at “Startup Mixology,” a regular, boozy event for techies in their twenties. Onstage, Kalanick clicked a remote control as a slide behind him flicked into view: Behind him was Jesus Christ, robed, hooded, and holding a shepherd’s cane. “I’m really frickin’ curious,” he noted, hitting the clicker again to showcase a fluffy cat, biting and batting around a toy. “Just think of me as The Wolf.”

The JamPad served two primary purposes: a place for Travis Kalanick to crash, and a place for Travis Kalanick and his techie friends to riff on ideas. “Jamming,” in Kalanick parlance, was like playing in a jazz quartet or a psychedelic rock band. Kalanick’s enthusiasm and support for risk-takers bred around him a small following of devoted friends. It all started, he would say, with a jam sesh.

On January 5, 2010, Kalanick posted: “Looking 4 entrepreneurial product mgr/biz-dev killer 4 a location based service. . pre-launch, BIG equity, big peeps involved--ANY TIPS??” he tweeted.

The company struck an early deal with AT&T, wherein they bought thousands of iPhones in bulk at a discounted price. These they would hand out for free to drivers, pre-programmed to run UberCab’s software. The AT&T deal brought Luddite drivers onto the network as quickly as possible. Tens of thousands of dollars in iPhones lined the walls of UberCab’s offices, stacked like white bricks. They piled atop one another faster than staff could give them away.

“What are we supposed to do here?” he said aloud, reading his name on a piece of paper that said he could be going to jail. Hayes, the venture capitalist, wasn’t sure what to say. He was used to investing in consumer tech companies, but rarely (if ever) did they run afoul of the law. Geidt, just a few months out of college, stood quiet and nervous, too. This was her first foray into the professional world. Now she was looking at jail time. Kalanick didn’t miss a beat. “We ignore it,” he said to the room.

Kalanick never revealed stats, but offered a bro-speak narrative of wild success. “The best metric I can give you is that Uber is killing it in San Francisco and we’re crushing it in New York,” Kalanick told a reporter in the early days after launching in Seattle.

Kalanick hired throngs of ambitious twentysomethings, fresh out of college and starry-eyed about Kalanick’s pitch. He spun stories of Uber’s eventual ubiquity, providing “transportation as reliable as running water.”¶¶ It wasn’t uncommon for a new hire to enter Uber’s headquarters having never managed anything more than a Starbucks, and be sent out to take over a new city.

There were drawbacks. Give too much autonomy to a legion of twentysomethings, and you’ll occasionally empower a battalion of douchebags. In France, one local promotion boasted “free rides from incredibly hot chicks.” The New York office was infamous for its bro-culture. Helmed by Josh Mohrer, a former frat boy turned MBA graduate, the bravado and aggression of management led to resignations and allegations of harassment. Every city office had its own cultural microclimate, for better or worse.

“The law isn’t what is written. It’s what is enforced.”

Kalanick was on. He was a force of nature with investors, a Jobsian tech wizard crossed with the hard-charging motivational speaker played by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. “A-B-C,” Kalanick chanted to himself, repeating Baldwin’s words in his head. “A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing. Always be closing!” Kalanick didn’t fuck around; he knew how to close a deal.

Kalanick and other executives said this regularly to inspire employees. That much of the world doesn’t actually have access to running water, and might want that need met first, was a detail that the Uber CEO and his peers never addressed.

Google eventually found out about Levandowski’s ruse. Instead of firing him, Google decided to buy Levandowski’s startup for $20 million. Side hustles like 510 Systems defined Levandowski. He liked money, but what he liked more was finding hacks and work-arounds. Levandowski may have labored at a giant corporation, but he was still a scrappy startup guy at heart. Building a business and selling it back to Google was validating; he had found a hole in the 20 percent time system, exploited it, and won. The $20 million windfall was good, too.

A job at Uber wasn’t just a job, after all—it was a mission, a calling. If you weren’t ready to stay late at the office and work nights and weekends, you shouldn’t be working at Uber. Company-wide dinner service—a perk that most large Silicon Valley companies offered for those who worked after hours—wasn’t served until 8:15 p.m. That meant you couldn’t work an extra hour after five o’clock and strategically grab a free meal at, say, six on your way out the door. You’d have to work an extra 3.25 hours to get your meal.

On-demand women, he joked, wasn’t that far off. “We call that boob-er,” Kalanick told the reporter. Suddenly, Kalanick wasn’t just a grown man-child in readers’ eyes, he was a blatant misogynist.

He noted that there were more than a hundred “unicorns” running loose in the Valley—in his view an insane amount. A unicorn earned the name by being unspeakably rare. Practically overnight, dozens of consumer startups had been valued well into the billions, many with little revenue to speak of. A hundred unicorns suggested to Gurley that some would turn out to be ponies with papier-mâché horns.

“What if we gave them a taste of their own medicine?” Michael continued. “What if we spent, I don’t know, a million dollars hiring a few journalists and top oppo people,” he said, referring to “opposition researchers”—those who get paid to dig up information on other people for a living. “They could look into your personal lives, your families. Help us actually fight back against the press,” Michael said. He was convinced there was dirt to be found investigating Lacy’s marriage and her relationship with her business partner, Carr. Michael wasn’t finished. “Ask 100 women whether they’d feel safer in an Uber or in a taxi,” Michael went on, referring to a recent story in which Lacy posted that she would stop using Uber, fearing for her safety because of the drivers. “If any women decided to delete the Uber app, like she did? And then they go on to take a taxi ride and, god forbid, are assaulted? She should be held personally responsible for that,” he said.

Not every MBA grad was an asshole, by any means. It just seemed that many of the ones who were assholes tended to feel at home joining Uber. At Uber, being cutthroat and competitive was considered an asset, not a liability.

Workers were threatened by managers with baseball bats if they didn’t meet targets. Once, this manager berated an employee about his performance so intensely, he made the man cry in front of the entire office. That same manager later dated one of his direct reports, causing discomfort among staff when he started favoring her in the workplace. Yet because Rio de Janeiro was one of Uber’s top performing markets, the numerous HR complaints about that manager went unresolved. To leadership, nothing mattered—as long as you made your numbers.

Until 2014, that is, when one executive had the brilliant idea of introducing the “Safe Rides Fee,” a new charge that added $1 to the cost of each trip. At the time Uber billed it as necessary for passengers: “This Safe Rides Fee supports our continued efforts to ensure the safest possible platform for Uber riders and drivers, including an industry-leading background check process, regular motor vehicle checks, driver safety education, development of safety features in the app, and insurance,” went the company’s blog post. If riders noticed the fee, they rarely complained. Many assumed it would just make their rides safer somehow. The reality was much less noble. As Uber’s insurance costs grew exponentially, the “Safe Rides Fee” was devised to add $1 of pure margin to each trip, according to employees who worked on the addition. That meant for each trip taken in the United States, Uber took in an extra dollar in cash. The drivers, of course, got no share of the extra buck. That number added up to hundreds of millions of dollars over years of operation, a sizeable new line of income. After the money was collected it was never earmarked specifically for improving safety. “Driver safety education” consisted of little more than a short, online video course. In-app safety features weren’t a priority until years later. “We boosted our margins saying our rides were safer,” one former employee said. “It was obscene.”

If there’s a single passage you read from this book, it’s this one

Voytek, a cognitive neuroscientist by trade, joined Uber because he loved the insight that such an enormous data set gave him into human behavior. Watching trips across cities being carried out in real time was like having his own personal human ant farm. “But that was then,” Voytek continued, noting the volume of people across multiple cities who were Uber-ing home from a stranger’s house the morning after.

Pham spun up a crisis team, poaching top security and fraud detection talent from local Bay Area competitors to form a fifty-person fraud squad at Uber’s HQ in San Francisco. He ordered local managers in China to review new sign-ups more rigorously. They introduced identity verification features and other tactics to screen drivers and riders over time.

Some scammers created giant makeshift circuit boards filled with hundreds of slots to insert SIM cards, the small microchips that allow mobile phones to communicate with a cellular network. Each SIM card in the circuit board acted as a new number that could automatically respond to a verification text for a newly created account, which the scammers then used to rack up more fake rides and bonuses. After the SIMs had been used, a scam artist replaced all the SIMs on the board with a fresh set of numbers and started the process all over again. Have hundreds or even thousands of “drivers” repeat that dozens of times per day, seven days a week, and it amounted to serious Uber losses.

But during the “charm offensive” Josh Mohrer, Uber’s brash and cocky general manager in Manhattan, had made a grave mistake. In an interview that week he let slip a mention of an early version of “Heaven,” a tool that provided a “God View” of riders on trips in real time. The reporter had taken an Uber to meet with Mohrer that afternoon. Mohrer bragged that he had tracked her the whole way. The comment would not go unnoticed.

“The board is irrelevant,” Kalanick said, waving them off of the idea. “I hand pick all of these guys. They do what I tell them, and the way I’ve structured things, I do what I want.” Cue was taken aback. Many founders at least performed a sense of humility in public—a strategic modesty that Kalanick clearly lacked.

each denial came without a real explanation why Apple had turned Uber down. Uber employees knew it was probably about InAuth’s code, but didn’t want to tip their hand if Apple hadn’t discovered it.

In Uber’s case, if the Uber app was used within the Bay Area or near Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, it wouldn’t run the InAuth “library” of code, which asked for the personal data needed to fingerprint phones.

Kalanick was trying on a new face for this meeting, one of conciliatory regret. He knew he could get away with telling the government and city authorities to kiss his ass. However, on rare occasions, he could sense he needed to humble himself. It almost never happened. But here, at Apple HQ, in front of its top brass—he kissed the ring.

“Hell” created a way for Uber to monitor the real-time positions of Lyft drivers. And because many of those drivers worked for Uber as well, Uber could monitor the rates Lyft was offering for drivers and outbid them, thereby swaying drivers to work more regularly for Uber.

He encouraged city managers in São Paolo or Rio de Janeiro to sign up as many riders and drivers as possible. To limit “friction” in the sign-up experience, Uber allowed riders to sign up without requiring them to provide identity beyond an email—easily faked—or a phone number. Further, Brazil was largely a cash-based economy where credit cards weren’t in common use, so there was no payment or identity data to gather on the individual riders.

While the lack of jobs meant many more Brazilians were willing to drive for Uber, the cash bankroll of each day’s earnings made them a tempting target for thieves. At least sixteen drivers were murdered in Brazil before Kalanick’s product team improved identity verification and security in the app.

Up until that point, the company had received few deletion requests. Everyone loved the product, and those who didn’t merely erased the app from their phone without deleting their account. There was no automated mechanism in place to handle such requests. By the time @Bro_Pair’s protest spurred a mass revolt, Kalanick was forced to assign an engineer the task of implementing a system to process the flood of account deletions.

Lyft’s executives then pulled a well-executed PR stunt, publicly donating $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union over four years, making themselves look like white knights while Uber was groveling before Trump.

Huffington cooed platitudes

This is her entire brand

looking as harmless as I could. My reporter trick is to play dumb and friendly; dumb and friendly is always more approachable than eager and prodding.

Uber employees were known to take money from the petty cash bin to pay off bribes, or forge receipts in the amount of the bribe and enter them into the expense account management system for reimbursement, behavior that, as of this writing, the Department of Justice is still investigating as a potential violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

While most of the syndicate expected the soft landing story to be carried out as planned, there were a select few who wanted it to look as messy as it all really was. And they used me, an unwitting participant, to make that happen.

“I suggest you talk to everyone before me,” Whitman told the recruiters. “If you run through that list and still find that you want me, call me back.”

pulled up a slide on his PowerPoint deck that made everyone in the room tense up: “There Cannot Be Two CEOs,” the slide read. As Khosrowshahi looked across the room, directly at Travis Kalanick, he made clear that were he to become Uber’s new leader, Kalanick would truly have to take a hike.

👏👏👏👏

cast one final ballot and all unanimously vote for the same candidate. That way, when they finally announced the decision to the public, the board could pretend it had been united the entire time. In the end, none of it went according to plan.

This company in a nutshell

The company earmarked half a billion dollars for 2018 solely to repair and rebrand its battered image.

Uber was firing him. More than a year ago, when Uber suffered a security breach that resulted in the theft of millions of drivers’ identities, Sullivan had not sought outside legal advice or counsel, nor did he inform the authorities it had occurred.

Before Khosrowshahi left Expedia, he had been the highest paid CEO of a publicly traded American company.

This statement as written is absolutely false